Ground Zero feedback

This thread is being started for everyone in the iDevGames community to give me suggestions and feedback on the development of my game.

For those of you that don't know what Ground Zero is it is an RTS game using an isometric tiling engine and will have gameplay similar to Total Annihilation. The special thing about this game is that when you build a unit (or a building in some cases) you will be able to give it custom weapons and armor (e.g. say you build a light soldier which has 20 points to spend on weapons and armor. you could give him a machine gun 10 pts and medium armor 10 pts, or if you feel so inclined you can give him a grenade launcher for 20 pts and completely forget armor) and I will be programming a map editor and a weapon/armor editor so the possibilities will be endless.

The first thing I want some feed back on is, Should I or should I not implement a unit class/structure editor into my game? There will be ways to restrain the amount of points the unit can hold. ( for example the cost in resources will be non-editable so the more points you give a single unit class the more it will cost to make. The same thing goes for the weapon editor the more damage the weapon does the more points it will cost to give to your unit)

I think you should not give points to units, but rather have different types of equipment have different costs. Given you have only one resource, this is pretty simple, maybe even boring.

But what if you have more types of resources? Lets take this as an example: money, energy, metal. Example: you have a soldier, and want to equip him with weapons and armor. You could chose a crappy steel armor, which is cheap, uses a lot of metal and little energy, but hampers the unit's speed, or you could equip it with a mighty expensive and energy consuming shield generator, which is far superior.

The only way I see with this point system is the weight, as a given unit can only carry so much, and armor cost, for example, should vary with the size of the unit.

And you should definitely allow for offline (out of the game) creation of unit sets which you can use in the game. In a single player campaign, it may not matter much that you stitch together units on the fly, because you can pause the game, but in multiplayer, this takes too much time.

The point system has to do with how much the unit will cost. there are 3 types of resources for the gathering (these are just temporary names) Metal ore, swamp gas and uranium. Speed and weight will play a factor when choosing weapons and armor for the unit. I was thinking about having the weapons and armor cost resources as well as the unit. There will also be ways to batch produce your custom unit via the number/modifier keys for a total of 30 preset units to build. so all you have to do is build one unit and then assign it a number. I was also thinking of haveing a group command so you can put a group of soldiers together and have them act as a single squad.

Ground Zero is the title we want but we are keeping an eye out for any other games with the same title so we can change it.

You will not remember which unit is what. For a hardcore gamer, this might not be much of an obstacle, but a beginner will be confused.

I think it makes much more sense to have named sets of units, and named units, from which you could choose to build one at any time. Each set could then contain the previews of the units, with their respective cost, in some kind of browser view (akin to TA or C&C).

The number and mod keys should be reserved for assigning groups and battle compounds, as usual. There is no way in hell to play TA without dividing your unit masses into tidy groups.

And back to the resources, and unit cost, think about the point system, again. The weight of the equipment is the only logical limiting factor, IMO. It should not have any direct relation to the cost, except on that level that maybe the same armor for a tank should cost more, since more is needed, and it is heavier, too.

So, you might consider calling those points of yours weight, but I am sure it should not solely determine the cost (high tech is lighter, but costs more).

There is more to the unit building system than that. (sorry I should have mentioned this before) but when you build a unit and assign it a number you will be able to see a list of all of the preset units there are to build for that particular building. and further more there is no reason why you cant use the number/modifier keys to group squads on the battlefield because the unit presets only pertain to the building you have selected.

The amount of points the unit has is not solely dependant upon how much weight the unit can carry but also for strategic purposes (for example, you have a med infantry and he has 40 points for the spending so you buy him a rocket launcher and light armor. and you have a light infantry with 20 points and you also buy him a rocket launcher with no armor. due to the weight of the rocket launcher the light soldier will be slowed to a crawl and will not do well in combat because of lack of armor. whereas the med infantry will do better because he can carry more weight without being slowed as much.) it is really up to the player how he wants to spend his points. but for the sake of comprehention we can call the points weight capacity.

For those of you who have played or heard of Warhammer 40,000 the point system for weapons in the game will be similar to the one in warhammer 40K. The hit points and armor system for shooting at units will be of its own origin (not based on anything) and until I get some artwork I can't do much on the main game so I am just working on the map editor right now.

The Ground Zero Project is in full swing now. and the title has officialy been changed to Ground Zero : The Apocalypse
Weapon editor has an interface and the map editor has a running interface. The main Game will be started on once I finish with the map editor and then I will finish the weapons editor.